GOOD ROADS.

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 70, 21 February 1918, Page 4

GOOD ROADS.

Their ß importance to Agriculture. The American Realisation. The following is from an address by E. Clifton, delivered to the class of about 95 school teachers at the Ruakura Farm of Instruction recently, which we have been asked to publish : " I may be permitted to describe to you the American conception of a good road. It is a road formed of concrete, of a width of 16 feet and maintaining a grade that may not exceed Ift in 20ft. The thickness of the concrete is of an average of five inches. The edge or sides of the concrete are protected with rock metal in width about afoot. The average cost of such roads is given at £2,400 per mile. This is now the standard road of North America. Roads of this standard are being built that now extend into a thousand miles. The Lincoln Highway, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, is already in use for upwards of a thousand miles. It will be, when completed, over 3000 miles. The Pacific Highway, from Vancouver in British Columbia, will at San Francisco have exceeded 1300 miles. It is already reaching a considerable mileage from each city. At San Francisco it crosses the Lincoln Highway, and itself continues along the Pacific coast line to San Diego, in Southern Calefornia, nearly 600 miles to the Mexican border. These great roads are the main arterial highways, and above all, •let it be realised that each district or county of each State is emulating the other in the effort to connect itself by a road that will be a standard similar to the great National highways. I had the opportunity of meeting a gentleman connected with the Highways Commissioners of California. I motored over one of these roads. I was acquainted with the country it traversed. In the conversation I asked how it was possible to construct such a road into comparatively an unoccupied country, and how they could afford to regrade so many miles through a mountain district. American fashion he first asked a question of me, ''What do you do?' We first content ourselves with an earth road, I replied, paid for by rates, subscribed in equal proportion to those rates by the State. We submit to these roads that are dust clouds in summer and mud channels in winter. We finally revolt, raise loans, for metal and macadamize. 'That is just our case, only we have learned,' he said. 'We would not take your macadamized road, no, not as a gift. -We say metal or rock ballast is too precious to put down in the mud and lose it. We add cement, and there is our road all the year round. Six years built, has yet a full sixty,-it is here for generations, here until the aeroplane takes the place of the road.' "

Sir Joseph Ward, PostmasterGenera], has received a cable message from the High Commissioner announcing that G2 bugs of letters, 30 bags of news and 179 registered parcels for Auckland were lost in the " Andania " off the Irish coast. The mail contained correspondence posted between January 23rd and 25th. Germany is putting 14.3 soldier® into the field for the same amount o* money which the United States i 8 paying for a single fighting man, according to calculations of Government experts. They said the same general proportion was true also of maintaining the armies in the field, or, in other words, America must raise 14.3 dollars where the enemy nation raises only 1 dollar for the purpose of carrying on the war. The difference was said to be due to the higher pay of United States soldiers and the greater cost of supplies. The number 13 is regarded by many as fatal, by thousands as merely " unlucky," and by a few as "lucky " (says the Wellington Post). Whatever it may be it has at least figured prominently on numerous occasions, and it has been responsible for some strange coincidences. Those adherents to the "unlucky " theory will be interested in the remarkable way in which 13 clung to the late Private W. Gillon, youngest son of Mrs Gilbn, of 111, Adelaide Road, Newtown. It proved a fateful number for him. Early in the war he enlisted, but was turned down as medically unfit. Then he was called up by ballot on January 18, 11)17. He went into camp on March 13, 1917, left New Zealand on Juno 13, arrived in England on August 13, left for Franco on October 113, and on January 13, 1918 —exactly one year after he had entered camp—his mother received a cable stating that her son had been killed on December 13. The late Private Gillon wrote a letter to his brother, Mr R. Gillon, of the Wellington Meat Export Company's staff, Ngnhauranga, on October 13, and it waa received by Mr Gillon on January 13, the date on which the cable announcing his brother's doath came to hand.